Woody Allen Wrote New Jokes for ‘Bullets Over Broadway’ Musical

The cast of “Bullets Over Broadway,” a new musical based on Woody Allen’s 1994 movie.

Associated Press

Once they had the story structure and music chosen for the new Broadway musical “Bullets Over Broadway,” Woody Allen began writing new jokes for the show, director Susan Stroman said Monday night in New York.

Stroman, who also choreographed “Bullets,” was part of a panel discussion sponsored by the Film Society at Lincoln Center after a screening of Allen’s 1994 movie on which the musical is based. She was joined by the show’s lead producers Letty Aronson and Julian Schlossberg.

During previews of “Bullets,” Allen would bring in a new joke every day, Stroman said. “It was like a gift.”

She said about 400 men and 400 women auditioned for the show, the film director’s first stage musical, which is nominated for six Tony Awards. Allen is nominated for the book and Stroman for choreography.

Not only do cast members have to sing, dance and act, they have to do comedy. “People don’t realize how hard comedy is. That’s something you can’t teach,” Stroman said.

Her goal was to cast people who could portray one-of-a-kind characters. For example, Vincent Pastore, known for his role on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” plays a gangster who finances the play-within-a-play as long as his girlfriend has a part.

Auditioning for Allen tended to make actors nervous and one fainted, cracking his skull, Stroman said.

“Bullets,” which opened April 10, stars Zach Braff, making his Broadway debut, and Broadway veteran Marin Mazzie. Braff portrays a young playwright who must make compromises to get his work produced on Broadway, including hiring the gangster’s talentless girlfriend and accepting rewrites suggested by her bodyguard.

Stroman said the issue of artists making compromises for their work is the main theme of the show and is of great interest to Allen. “Would you kill for your art?” she asked.

“In Woody’s mind, Cheech (the bodyguard) is the real artist because he won’t compromise for his art. He dies for it,” she added.

Aronson, Allen’s sister, pointed out that the show opened exactly two years after the creators’ first meeting to discuss the project. The idea of turning “Bullets” into a Broadway musical had been discussed for years but Allen couldn’t think of a composer who could do it, she added.

Once they decided to use existing music, the main work involved restructuring the material for the stage, where eight locations are the most possible, compared with 50 or so in a movie, Stroman said. They also had to create a reason for the audience to want to return after the intermission, similar to a cliffhanger in a television series season finale, she said.

Stroman and Allen chose the songs, most from the 1920s, and worked with arranger Glen Kelly, who wrote new lyrics for some. She said Allen preferred to use less well-known songs, although the show includes some standards, such as “Let’s Misbehave,” “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do” and “Up a Lazy River.”

The hardest part was choosing songs that would push the plot forward, she noted.

Asked to compare working with Allen and with Mel Brooks, author of the 2001 Broadway hit “The Producers,” which she directed and choreographed, Stroman said the men are quite different: Allen is shy, quiet and businesslike, while Brooks is big and loud and his characters are more exaggerated.

“Woody’s characters are authentic. The humor comes out of his incredible dialogue.”

“They are both geniuses,” she added. “The jokes just come out.”

And both are fast writers, a skill they learned working in live television in the 1950s, Schlossberg pointed out.

Stroman said she was surprised to find that “Bullets” was subject to “some arrows” from the press. Among issues raised in recent articles were whether scandals about Allen’s personal life would hurt ticket sales, reports that Allen refused to cast black actors as gangsters, and speculation whether Allen or Stroman was in charge.

Schlossberg noted that his job as a producer is to negotiate disputes between writers and directors and he did not do that once on this show.

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